Ethernet Local Area Networks (LANs) are used to connect multiple computing devices to a network. Generally a LAN configuration is sufficient when the number of computing devices (e.g., computers, appliances, peripherals) communication with one another is relatively small. However, when the number of computing devices increase, multiple networks or network segments will require interconnection. There are a variety of techniques for connecting multiple network segments. One of the easiest and oldest techniques for connecting multiple network segments is using an Ethernet Bridge. Ethernet bridges have multiple Ethernet Network Interfaces, which connect to networks that require a bridge.
Apart from being able to interconnect Ethernet Networks, bridges can also help with segregating network traffic. For example, in an enterprise with 5 departments having 25 computing devices each, on simple way of connecting all 25 computing devices to a single LAN. While this technique will work, the technique has some obvious disadvantages, since computing devices associated with one department of the enterprise will be disrupted when two computing devices from another department communicate with one another. Thus, a more efficient network design for enterprise is to have a separate LAN for each separate department, where each separate LAN is interconnected with a bridge. In this way, all intra-department traffic will not be present to disrupt other traffic. Moreover, only inter-department traffic will be present on the bridge.
As previously discussed, Ethernet bridges are one of the oldest techniques for interconnecting LANs. Since the inception of Ethernet bridges, they have been enhanced to serve a variety of needs. Once such need relates to connecting (e.g., bridging) multiple LANs that are not in geographic proximity to one another. In these circumstances, Ethernet is transmitted on top of a different framing media (e.g., Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Gigabit Ethernet (GigE), Frame Relay (FR), Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM), and others). This creates an enhanced bridge with different framing media to external networks.
The enhanced bridge is capable of peeling off the framing headers to detect the Ethernet packet and then performing standard Ethernet bridging operations as if the data were received from a standard LAN interface. This type of enhanced Ethernet Bridge is widely implemented in enterprises with large network branches that are geographically dispersed in order to interconnect the LANs associated with the network branches.
There are a number of conventional products that perform Ethernet bridging over Ethernet media, Ethernet bridging over FR media, Ethernet bridging over ATM media, and the like. However, these conventional products do not permit media agnostic Ethernet bridging. In other words, conventional approaches use a separate and often hardwired network resource that communicates with a specific network interface media. Each network resource is dedicated to a network interface in order to provide Ethernet bridging for a specific media type (e.g. ATM, GigE, FR, TDM, and others) handled by the network interface.
By dedicating network resources to specific network interfaces, an enterprise's heterogeneous networks are not efficiently and flexibly interconnected. Many times the dedicated resources are the result of an enterprise gradually growing its networks, with a later decision to bring the networks together. Alternatively, enterprises can merge previously disconnected departmental networks, or merge with other enterprise networks, and there exist a desire to interconnect the heterogeneous networks. Yet, with conventional approaches the bridging domains for each disparate network is isolated using separate network resources. As one of ordinary skill in the art appreciates, this can be expensive, inflexible, and time consuming for an enterprise to implement.
Therefore, there exist a need for techniques that provide improved heterogeneous network bridging, which are media agnostic. Thus, network resources need not be hardwired or dedicated to a single network interface, and a single bridging domain can be used to bridge all media transmissions.